Every term below is used on this site in one settled sense. Where the Coalition refuses a word, this page says which word and why. Where a term has a legal definition, the definition is the one given here, and nothing on the site stretches it.
One rule governs the whole page. The Coalition chooses its own words. It does not choose anyone else’s. Where a court, a government, a United Nations body or a news organisation used a word, the quotation keeps that word exactly, including words this site otherwise refuses. Changing a quotation to match the Coalition’s terminology would be a misquotation, and everything else on this site depends on quotations being exact.
So a page may say victims in one line and quote an organisation saying deportees in the next. That is not an inconsistency. It is the rule working.
Uses the Coalition’s own word Avoids never in the Coalition’s voice Term of art defined elsewhere in law Site label a status shown on a page
The people
Victim Uses
A person subjected to third-country removal. The Coalition uses this word because it describes what is done to the person rather than the paperwork under which it is done.
What is done is this. People are taken from detention with little or no notice. They are handcuffed, shackled at the ankles, and in some cases secured with a chain running between the two. They are put aboard aircraft, including military aircraft, for flights that can run ten hours or longer. Many are not told where they are being flown. They land in a country they have never seen, whose language they may not speak, where they know nobody and have no standing to be.
Most were not living in hiding. Many had been on orders of supervision for years, reporting when required, without a single incident, holding jobs and raising United States citizen children. On the day of removal they were handled as though they were none of those things.
Several have been held on arrival, some incommunicado. Some have been sent onward to the country they were protected from. The Coalition regards this treatment as inflicting severe pain and suffering, on the person and on the family left behind, and says so in those words.
Where a page is recording the bare facts of a transfer rather than describing the treatment, it says the people transferred, which carries no assumption in either direction. Both are accurate. Neither is the removing state’s word.
Deportee Avoids
The removing state’s word, and not one this site uses in its own voice.
It describes a person entirely by an act done to them, and it treats that act as settled and lawful. For many of the people documented here it is also wrong on the facts. They held protection ordered by a United States immigration judge against removal to the country they feared, and were then moved somewhere else instead. Someone removed in the face of that protection is not adequately described as a person who was deported.
Appears on this site only inside quotations.
The people transferred Uses
The neutral form, used where the sentence is establishing a fact rather than characterising treatment: how many were sent, when, from where, and what is known of them since. It states the act without adopting the removing state’s justification for it.
Receiving state Uses
A state that has agreed to accept people transferred from the United States who are not its own nationals. Preferred to host country, which implies a welcome, and to partner, which implies a shared purpose.
The transfer
Third-country removal Term of art
Removal to a state other than the one named in the removal order, and other than the person’s country of nationality or former habitual residence. It is the subject of this project.
Arrangement Uses
The general word for whatever instrument governs a transfer, used because the instruments differ enormously and most have never been published. Where the form is known, the site names it precisely: a treaty-level agreement, a memorandum of understanding, an exchange of notes verbales, or an undisclosed understanding reported but never produced.
The distinction matters. Some of these instruments create binding obligations. At least one states in its own text that it creates none.
Diplomatic assurance Term of art
An undertaking by a receiving state that a person transferred to it will not be tortured or persecuted, and in some instruments that they will not be sent onward. An assurance is a promise, not a safeguard, and its worth depends on whether anyone can check it. The site records, for each assurance, whether it is published, whether it is individual or categorical, and whether any monitoring attaches to it.
Onward transfer Uses
Movement of a person from the receiving state to a further state, including back to the country they were protected from. Where it has happened it is recorded as onward transfer. Where an instrument merely contemplates it, the site says the instrument contemplates it and quotes the words.
The harms
Torture Term of art
Defined by article 1 of the Convention against Torture as any act by which severe pain or suffering, physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for purposes such as obtaining information or a confession, punishment, intimidation or coercion, or for a reason based on discrimination, where the pain is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.
Cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment Term of art
Ill-treatment that does not meet the threshold of torture but is prohibited alongside it. Conditions of detention, denial of medical care and prolonged incommunicado detention have all been found to reach it.
Refoulement Term of art
Returning a person to a place where they face persecution, torture or other serious harm. The prohibition is absolute under the Convention against Torture. It admits no exception and no balancing against any other interest.
Chain refoulement Term of art
Refoulement reached in stages. A person is sent to one state, which then sends them to another, from which return follows. The Committee against Torture reads the prohibition as reaching not only the state a person is sent to but any state to which that person may subsequently be sent, which is why an instrument that permits onward transfer is treated on this site as a risk in itself.
Arbitrary detention Term of art
Detention without legal basis, without the safeguards that must accompany it, or on discriminatory grounds. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention decides individual cases against five categories, and where the site relies on such a decision it names the categories found.
Enforced disappearance Term of art
Detention by or with the acquiescence of the state, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the detention or to disclose the person’s whereabouts, placing them outside the protection of the law. Several people transferred under these arrangements have been held in undisclosed locations.
Human trafficking Term of art
Defined by the Palermo Protocol as the recruitment, transport, transfer, harbouring or receipt of a person by means of threat, force, coercion, abduction, fraud, deception or the abuse of a position of vulnerability, for the purpose of exploitation.
Whether particular third-country removals meet that definition is contested, and no court or treaty body has so held on any of the arrangements documented here. Where a source characterises a transfer that way, the site attributes the characterisation to that source and does not adopt it as a finding. What the Coalition says in its own voice about these transfers is set out under Victim, above.
How the record is described
Finding Term of art
A conclusion reached by a body with authority to reach it: a court, a United Nations treaty body, special procedure or working group, a regional human rights body, or a national human rights institution. A state’s own admission to a body it answers to is treated as a finding against itself.
Report Term of art
An account by a named and identifiable source that has not been ruled on by any such body. Reports carry weight on this site and can support an Alert. They are always labelled as reports, and never described as findings.
Allegation Term of art
A claim put before a body that has not yet decided it. A complaint, a petition or a filed case is an allegation until the body rules. Where a supervisory body has merely recorded what a complainant alleges, the site says the body recorded an allegation, because recording is not adjudicating.
Alert Site label
The designation the Coalition applies to a receiving state where a reliable, identified source reports a risk to the safety of the people sent there. It is a warning, not a verdict, and the page carrying it names every source it rests on.
Investigating Site label
The Coalition has looked for a record on that point and has not located one, and is still looking. It is a statement about the state of the record, not a finding that the thing did not happen. It is never an all-clear.
Not established Site label
Nothing on the point has been determined either way, and the site is not asserting that anything has.
The bodies and the instruments
Convention against Torture Term of art
The Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, adopted 1984. Article 3 prohibits return to a state where there are substantial grounds for believing a person would be in danger of torture.
Committee against Torture Term of art
The treaty body that supervises the Convention. It examines state reports and issues concluding observations, and where a state has made a declaration under article 22 it can decide individual complaints. Most of the receiving states documented here have made no such declaration.
OPCAT, and the national preventive mechanism Term of art
The Optional Protocol to the Convention establishes a system of visits to places of detention, carried out internationally by the Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture and domestically by a national preventive mechanism each state party must set up. Whether a receiving state has ratified the Optional Protocol, and whether its mechanism exists in fact, is recorded on every country page, because it determines whether anyone can enter the place where people are held.
Special procedures Term of art
Independent experts appointed by the Human Rights Council, including special rapporteurs and working groups. They issue communications to states and public statements, and their conclusions are treated on this site as findings.
If a term is used on this site in a way this page does not cover, or in a way that does not match the definition given here, that is an error and the Coalition wants to know. Write and say which page and which word.